1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, in general, to multitasking within a computing environment, and in particular, to multitasking in a hardware interrupt free computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
At times, it is desirable to operate within a computing environment with limited functionality enabled. This reduces complexity and facilitates debugging. However, in order to provide limited functionality, certain features are disabled or not provided. One such feature is system or hardware interrupts. The disabling of system interrupts reduces the complexity of the environment, but at a cost. The cost is that certain functions are not provided, such as, for instance, multitasking.
Multitasking enables an individual process to share resources (e.g., CPU, memory, etc.) with one or more other individual processes without requiring the process to completely exit before allowing another process to execute. Instead, the multitasking processes remain resident in memory.
With the disabling of system interrupts, however, multitasking is not performed. Instead, a process runs for a period of time, saves its state in persistent storage, and then exits completely, before another process that is to share the resource commences execution. This increases complexity and degrades system performance. Thus, a need exists for a capability that enables multitasking in the absence of hardware interrupts.